


Orpheus's Love Song

by Ariel_Tempest



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Alternate Ending, Dark, Drugs, Kinda Distressing Crack, M/M, Yes Erik Is Crazy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 07:24:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7351570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariel_Tempest/pseuds/Ariel_Tempest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faced with the reality that Christine doesn't love him, Erik releases her. However, that doesn't mean he's given up on finding a partner...one way or another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orpheus's Love Song

**Author's Note:**

> Originally done for a challenge in 2005, published on FicWad. Prompt was "Sex, Drugs, and Rock n' Roll". Given the fandom, it's more "Sex, Drugs, and Opera", but you do what you can.

His lungs hurt.

His lungs hurt, his eyes didn’t want to quite focus, his head was pounding and although the bed underneath him was quite comfortable, the rope lashed around his wrists was digging into his skin. He squirmed, shifting onto his side, blearily trying to make out his surroundings. He didn’t recognize the room immediately, despite the fact it fit Christine’s description perfectly - the simple, mahogany bedstead, the sofa, the lamp sitting on the Louis-Philippe chest of drawers. It was the incredibly tall shadow standing in front of the drawers that jogged his memory - the incredibly tall, thin shadow carefully feeding an opaque looking liquid into a hypodermic needle.

He tried to sit up suddenly without much effect. He didn’t have the needed leverage with his arms bound behind him and lying on his side as he was he wound up sort of flopping like an overly large fish.

The shadow paused in what it was doing and turned to look at him. “Awake, eh? How are you feeling?”

“Let me go.” While he was fairly certain his glower was impressive, his voice came out as a half gasped croak.

The shadow chuckled, turning toward the bed with the needle in its hand. “My dear Vicomte, of course I’m not going to let you go. Why, who would I have to keep me company without you here? I’ve sent Christine home you know. Dear, sweet child…I really don’t know what I was thinking, keeping her here in my tomb with me.” He laughed, a too sharp, hysterical sound. “She’d have gone mad eventually you know. She’d have either convinced herself she really did love me – imagine! Actually loving me! Ha!- or she’d have hanged herself.”

“Well I’m glad you figured that out…” Raoul muttered under his breath, squirming a little, trying to get his hands free. Unfortunately the ropes were quite well tied and refused to budge.

“Oh, but she’d have loved me, eventually, if she hadn’t been distracted…if she hadn’t had someone pretty to think of…a handsome lover, a would-be-husband, a childhood memory.” One hand reached out, wrapping itself around Raoul’s jaw, squeezing tightly enough to leave bruises, forcing the young aristocrat’s head back until his entire throat was exposed. “A knight in shining armor. God, I should kill you for existing, for being there to take everything for granted! For taking her for granted when I fought so hard to be what she wanted!”

“Erik…” Raoul croaked, wincing at the tightness of his throat, half pleading. He didn’t know what good it would do, doubted it would do any good at all, really, but the hand at his throat simply served to drive home his helplessness and wake him up enough to feel properly afraid. All he could hope to do was appeal to whatever reason, or perhaps it was mercy, the madman possessed.

“Yes. Erik.” The pressure on Raoul’s neck stopped but didn’t abate any as his captor slid onto the bed next to him, bringing that masked face close enough for the Vicomte to hear breath against the shaped silk. “Her poor, poor Erik who she would have cheerfully left for her dear, dear Raoul. You’d have taken her without a thought, wouldn’t you? Ah, but she would have let you. That’s the betrayal, really, the cheat, the lie, that she would have left me when she promised, promised! that she loved me!” Erik half shrieked, his hand closing around Raoul’s throat, lifting and slamming the aristocrat’s head back into the pillow hard before releasing him all together. For a long moment, there was near-silence, broken only by the harsh breathing of the self-styled Opera Ghost.

Raoul didn’t move. He closed his eyes, swallowed, trying to pull moisture into his mouth and wincing as his abused respiratory system complained. He randomly remembered the water, rushing up through the trapdoor in the torture chamber, flooding the glass walls up, over his head. No wonder his lungs hurt, really.

A soft chuckle replaced the harsh breaths. Reluctantly, Raoul opened his eyes and looked up at his captor. He couldn’t see anything as Erik’s obscenely long, overly effeminate hair blocked most of his face and the black silk of the mask finished the job, but the other man’s shoulders were shaking slightly.

“I should, perhaps, kill you.” Erik straightened from the odd, half hunched position he’d maintained after throttling Raoul. “After all, you broke into my house. You threatened my life. You tried to take the one thing I wanted more than anything else. But really, the true crime was hers, so it’s only fitting that she be the one who’s punished, isn’t it?”

What little moisture Raoul had pulled into his mouth fled. “Leave Christine alone!”

“Leave Christine alone!” The other man parroted back, mocking. “Why, of course I’m going to leave Christine alone, Monsieur! I couldn’t dream of actually inflicting serious harm upon my darling! Even at the height of madness, I’ve never marred her perfection or caused her lasting damage!” He laughed again and the sound made Raoul wince. “But you’ll also leave her alone, Monsieur. That will be her punishment, you see? For daring to lie to me and then leave, letting you take her from me, I shall take you from her.”

“But she loved me!” Raoul insisted. “She’ll never feel anything but revulsion for you, you crazed lunatic, and while we’re on the subject neither will I!”

“Indeed?” All of a sudden, Erik was quite calm. He reached one, long fingered, overly bony hand out to smooth back the short, gilded strands of Raoul’s hair, causing the aristocrat to jerk his head to the side. “Never? What if I said I could make you feel something else, Monsieur?” He lifted the needle, holding it into the light for Raoul to see. The liquid inside was oddly iridescent and looked more like trapped mist than anything else.

“What is that?” Raoul’s skin crawled as he looked at the needle, the insinuation of the other man’s words sending horror creeping through his veins.

“It doesn’t have a name. It’s something I created, like my opera.” With an almost paternal tone in his voice, Erik worked the liquid into the tip of the needle, then reached down and undid Raoul’s cufflinks, pushing the sleeve of his dress shirt up nearly to the elbow. “It won’t harm you, I promise. As a matter of fact, I’d be surprised if you didn’t enjoy it greatly.” His fingers tightened, vice like, around Raoul’s arm, just below the elbow, retarding the blood flow severely. The back of one finger thumped against the veins. There was a slight stinging, followed by a long, slow, painful pressure and another sting as the needle was pulled from his arm. “Just relax, Monsieur. You’ll feel better shortly.” His fingers smoothed over the injection site, soothing outraged nerves and coaxing the blood to flow more freely, carrying its load to his captive’s brain. He then unbound the other man.

Raoul struggled right up until he felt the first sting. Then he moaned, burying his face in the pillow as if he could hide from his helplessness. He almost demanded again to know what the drug was, what, exactly, it would do to him, but in the end he decided he didn’t want to know.

He didn’t relax, not even when his captor stood and paced back over to the chest of drawers, setting the needle down on the marble top and dimming the lamp to near darkness. He didn’t move, didn’t run or attack, there would be no point in that now that he was already tainted, but he kept himself rigid, aware, trying to fight off the effects of he knew not what. In an attempt to keep himself distracted, or perhaps focused, he asked, “Why did you really let her go?”

There was a hesitation, then, “I’ve already told you. She would have gone mad.” Erik’s tone was carefully neutral. “Last night…last night she was strong. Calm. When she let me kiss her, she could have survived anything, I think. But she’s not naturally that way, is she, Monsieur? No. We both know she’s not. Not the beautiful little girl who still dreams of the stories her father told her and the Angel who will come to guide her. Not your childhood sweetheart who was so overjoyed when her Prince entered her life again. She couldn’t have kept up that strength, couldn’t have kept loving me. It would have destroyed her.”

There was an undertone to the other man’s voice that Raoul couldn’t quite place. Resigned? Sad? Wistful? All of the above? He rather thought it was all of the above. Something about the way his captor’s hands moved over the top of the chest of drawers, methodically gathering the little vials he’d brought in with him together in a little pile, something about the way he wouldn’t look at Raoul, gave the entire scene a very lonely feel. It was as if Raoul himself weren’t really there, he was just looking in through a pane of glass, watching Erik go through the motions of his life.

“And you think losing me won’t destroy her?” He didn’t ask to be malicious or as an attack, it was simply a question, something to say because it was vitally important that he say something, although he didn’t quite remember why.

Erik chuckled softly. “I have no idea.” He reached up and untied the ribbons holding his mask in place, pulling the softly shimmering black away from his face and placing it on the marble. He looked up at the wall in front of him as if looking in a mirror although there was no mirror there. Raoul stared, fascinated by the profile he was shown, the transparent membrane extending over the cartilage in the end of the nose, forming the fleshy line of the lips. Normally he would have been repulsed, but just now the way those lips moved was the most interesting thing in the world. “Perhaps it will. Perhaps it won’t. You’re hardly the only Prince in the world, Monsieur, and Princes aren’t everything. She has her freedom, that’s the important part. She’s free to find a new Prince, to pursue her career with the Opera, or to slit her wrists. Only God knows which she’ll choose.” Erik turned his face back to the bed. “Either way, it’s not exactly our concern anymore, now is it? I’ve freed her, but really, I’ve also freed us. Since she’s no longer part of our lives, we have no obligation to care.”

Raoul frowned. There was something wrong with that logic. He still cared about Christine, whether she was there or not. “But…you still care about her, don’t you?”

At first it didn’t seem the other man was going to answer. He crossed once more to where Raoul lay and sat down next to the younger man. One hand reached out and brushed against Raoul’s face again, this time stroking lightly along other man’s jaw line.

Raoul didn’t flinch or pull away. He wasn’t frightened, simply curious, wanting to know what the other man was going to do next. At some point in the conversation the world had gone faintly hazy, although the edges of things were clearly defined as ever, maybe even more so, and despite his best intentions he was feeling quite relaxed.

“Yes.” The word was soft enough that Raoul didn’t really hear the word itself so much as the silence it left in its wake. “I still care. I…still love her.”

Not shifting an inch from his comfortable position, Raoul stared up at the other man. His eyes traced the veins crawling across Erik’s cheeks and around those extremely large, dark eyes. He noted the pits and folds in the clearly visible skull. It was odd. He’d always thought that bones were white, but this skull, still living, still serving its purpose, was a dark grey-brown colour. The veins stood out against it like red and blue vines on a piece of stone work. Or maybe they were more purple and blue…or something. He couldn’t quite name the colours.

He lifted one hand, lazily, to where Erik’s hand still rested on his collar bone and laid his fingers on the slender line of the other man’s wrist. “I’m sorry.” He had absolutely no idea why he was sorry, but he suddenly was, deeply, immensely sorry.

Shifting his hand so that he could lift Raoul’s to his lips, Erik chuckled softly. “It’s alright, Monsieur. I’ve managed to stay alive for over forty years now. I’m used to it. Still…” he brushed his lips against Raoul’s knuckles, “I’m growing very tired of it. I wish for life to change…or end. Either way.”

Suddenly what the other man was saying wasn’t important anymore. Christine was a long forgotten memory and the possible danger he was in? Well, Raoul wasn’t one to worry about such things, not when there was something so incredibly soft brushing against his skin, sending little shivers along the nerves immediately connected to the site. He gasped, blue eyes widening.

His captor chuckle again. “Enjoy that, do you?” Erik brushed his lips against the other man’s skin again, rewarded by a soft moan, then picked a finger and ran the tip of his tongue the length of it. That got him another little noise and a squirm from the body next to him. “One advantage of being able to go absolutely anywhere in a place like this,” his tone stayed conversational while he sought out various parts of his captive’s hand to nuzzle or lick – the palm, the wrist, the webbing between the fingers, “is that one sees all sorts of…interesting…things. It’s actually quite educational.”

Raoul really wasn’t paying attention to the words, although he faintly recognized that later, if he remembered them, they would explain some of what was happening, somehow. At the moment, however, he was too interested in watching the other man’s tongue against his skin, noting how every time it moved, it caused him to shiver. He cautiously sat up, leaning in curiously, trying to get a better look at what was happening. He watched Erik lick across his palm, swirl his tongue around the ball of his thumb, suck one finger between those transparent lips. That felt especially good. It made him want to melt back in the mattress, made a warmth, not dissimilar to a glass of well aged wine, curl in his stomach. He wanted more of the sweet suction, the soft wetness stroking along the finger’s length. He didn’t know what, exactly, he wanted, but he wanted it quite badly.

_Fate links me to you forever and a day._

The music echoed in his head. Despite the fact Erik’s lips didn’t move from around the finger it was definitely Erik’s voice, the same intonation he’d heard the night he’d watched Christine vanish from her dressing room, and he could feel the vibrations run down his captive finger. With a soft mewling noise, he shut his eyes. It seemed that with his eyes closed, he might be able to actually see the music, haunting and beautiful, etched on the insides of his eyelids. Instead the warm wetness around his finger went away, fingers cupped the back of his head, and he was suddenly unable to breathe. He opened his mouth wider, trying to find oxygen, but all that happened was that he felt something – something long, warm, strong – brush against the inside of his cheek, trace along the hard palate and along the ridge behind his teeth.

Fortunately, it was about then that his body remembered what his nose was for, because that something in his mouth felt wonderful and he didn’t want to pull away from what his brain finally registered as a kiss. The mattress came up to meet him from below and he found himself pressed into the welcoming down. That was nice because his back muscles had been beginning to protest the effort of keeping himself upright. It was even nicer because there was something slightly warm covering him. It was a heavy something, too heavy and hard to be a blanket, and it moved, but it was still slightly warm and it felt nice.

_Fate links me to you forever and a day_.

 Slowly the kiss was broken. Raoul groaned and let his eyes flutter open. The view directly above him was of the ceiling. It was raining. Either that or there were minnows up there. Little silver lines went shooting from one end of the room to the other, diagonally, corner to corner. It had to be rain because minnows didn’t swim that straight and that rain kept dropping down and hitting him, trailing along his jaw and neck in light, warm splashes that made his stomach knot up terribly. They never hit the same place twice, although sometimes one would run, trickling a very fine path for a distance, as if someone were painting on his skin with warm water.

He’d never liked the rain before. He decided he liked it now.

Fingers traced down the other side of his neck, the one the rain wasn’t falling on, along his collar bone and down to the buttons holding his shirt closed. Slowly they pried the buttons open, pushing the silk back, leaving his chest exposed to the air and the slowly falling dampness. He shivered, part of him wanting his shirt back on so that he’d stay warm, the other wanting the feeling of silk on skin to keep on going forever.

He also wanted his trousers to go away. They were too hot and too tight and were generally making him uncomfortable.

The trousers stayed though. It was only his shirt that was pushed back as far as it would go so that the warm rain could continue falling along his collar bone, pectoral muscles, down the line of his stomach. It tickled, made his lips twist up at the edges, made him squirm, but he somehow avoided laughing. Instead he whined, whimpered, shifted his hips in a helpless attempt to relieve the discomfort below his waist.

He closed his eyes again. It was still raining, but behind his eyelids the rain was gold instead of silver and there were fireflies dancing between the drops. One drop of rain fell directly on his nipple, the warm moisture somehow sucking at the skin making him gasp. He wasn’t exactly aware of tilting his head back, lifting his shoulders up, lifting into the touch. He was aware of the effect though, of his blood shifting like the tide, leaving him dizzy.

The fireflies turned into stars.

One hand came up, grasping desperately for something to cling to, something he could steady himself against to keep himself from getting swept away in the dizzy tide. It closed over the bony arch of a silk covered shoulder, fingers molding themselves tightly over the ridge. The move was rewarded by the suction around his nipple strengthening and a firm pressure caressing over his lower abdomen, sliding briefly under the waist band of his cursed trousers.

The shoulder pulled away from his grip, the rain stopped falling, and he was left drifting in a sea of dancing stars. The stars were constant, regardless of whether he opened his eyes or closed them. Amid the points of light, he felt his waist and legs being lifted, something sliding over them, and suddenly the horrid, constricting pressure was gone. He gave a sigh of relief. He stretched his legs, then relaxed, content for the moment to simply float.

He didn’t know if his eyes were open or closed when the angel leaned over him. It was a strange angel, a dark angel, but so familiar somehow that he couldn’t really be afraid. It reached down with one iridescent white hand and cupped his face in its fingers. Smiling, he nuzzled that cool palm, his tongue flickering out to lick it in supplication.

_Fate links me to you forever and a day_.

The music was in his head. It was the angel and the angel was it and he wanted more of that music touching him. He reached up, tentatively and touched the angel’s face, slid his fingers up into the angel’s radiantly black hair, marveling as the strands wove around his skin, living things clinging to him.

Smiling, the angel leaned down, kissed him, pressed its body along his warming his chilled skin. He welcomed it, bringing one leg up to wrap around its waist, trying to pull it closer. Their skin melded where it touched, parting only reluctantly when they shifted, then melding again. The kisses became more frequent until he swore that he was breathing the angel’s breath and it was that which was keeping him alive.

_Fate links me to you forever and a day._

The angel was inside of him, moving. He wasn’t certain when it had happened or how, but he could feel the strange energy crawling along under his skin. It hummed, sang to him like a violin, twitched behind his eyes and set his heart pulsing to its own, wild beat. He couldn’t breathe. The angel sang to him, danced inside of him, played him like a well timed orchestra and all he could do was lay there and marvel at it all. There were more stars now, clouding up the sky until he could barely see the angel bending over him anymore. He moved his lips sporadically, trying to sing along.

_Fate links me to you forever and a day._

The song hit its peak. The stars exploded. Raoul tried to keep track of the world, but he got lost as the light faded into darkness and the darkness into sleep.

 

***

 

Long fingers cupped the boy’s sleeping face, their normal pallor enhanced by the blush lingering around his cheeks. He was, naturally, out cold, the drugs and sex having leeched him of any and all energy, but his lips, slightly parted, were turned up gently at the edges.

Erik snorted lightly, then bent down for one last kiss.

“I had imagined someone more willing for my first…and last.” The Opera Ghost muttered, pulling out of the unconscious body below him. “But you will do, Monsieur. You at least enjoyed it, I think, with help.” He didn’t bother with clothing other than his mask. His trousers and shirt remained in a crumpled heap on the floor where the young aristocrat would surely find them when he woke.

Humming softly to himself, he collected the empty needle from the nightstand, his extra vial of liquid from the dresser top. It had not been what he wanted, no, but he was quite used to making due and there had been a delicious sort of justice to it. Perhaps he’d take the boy again, later. Perhaps after enough doses, there would be enough of the drug in their veins to pass for actual love. Perhaps…

In his own room, he lay down, naked, in his coffin. He carefully filled the needle, slid its point under his own skin, and watched the drugs swirl out into his bloodstream. Laying his head back on the red, satin of the lining, he closed his eyes and waited for the dreams.


End file.
